The Birthday Buyer Read Free Page B

remained in the camp. He was one of the last to leave. Others had already departed, and taken the healthy prisoners with them on forced marches that left a trail of dead on the roads. The bullet hit him in the chest and the impact made him fall off the truck. His troops abandoned him there; nobody could do anything for him and the driver preferred to speed on his way.
    The chaos of Auschwitz didn’t disappear when the Russians arrived. There is confusion, a constant noise of shouting and praying, some happy, some indignant, others hardly able to overcome their state of paralysis and denied humanity. They no longer know that they are men because they have long ceased to be. Those who can walk, go to and fro through mud and snow. Nobody speaks to them. Nobody worries about anyone. The Soviet soldiers simply look on, awkwardly, as if they were at the gates to hell. They don’t dare act as liberators. They don’t understand what their eyes can see. Nobody gives orders. The inmates don’t understand what is happening, although they all—most of them dying—know that the SS have gone and that that is a good thing.
    They improvised an infirmary at one corner of the esplanade, in a shack previously used by the guards for executions by hanging. The less seriously sick had to look after the others. There were no doctors, only Soviet or Polish nurses to-ing and fro-ing, unable to do anything, terrified and disgusted by what they found with every step they took. They set up a line of twenty bunks in the shack with very thin straw mattresses.
    Buczko, the cobbler, a thirty-four-year-old native of Pomerania stricken with dysentery, carried the prisoner Primo Levi in his arms: Levi had a raging temperature, was delirious and couldn’t walk by himself. He was from the Buna-Monowitz camp.
    The schoolteacher from Radzyn, Rubem Yetzev, fifty-five, with horrific rheumatism in all his joints, was looking after three sick inmates who had dragged themselves that far. Rubem Yetzev had carried them one by one over his shoulders along the last stretch to the infirmary, put them on bunks and then stretched out on one himself. The three men were Abrahan Levine, Elias Achtzehn and Ernst Sterman, and were suffering respectively from diphtheria, acute typhoid and tuberculosis. The first two were to die in the shack.
    The ice-cream manufacturer, Chaim Roth, forty-seven, born in Katowice, looked after Ira his brother, who had gone out of his mind and kept biting his hands.
    Henek, fifteen, a worker from Transylvania in Hungary, carried the three-year-old he’d rescued from the snow on Christmas Eve, wrapped up in an SS overcoat. He had been looking after him ever since. The child struggled to breathe and only his restless eyes had any life. His eyes weren’t sad, but anguished, weren’t blank but insistent. He said nothing, except for a strange word that Henek interpreted as Hurbinek.
    The rest of the sick were: Prosper Andlauer (French), Franz Patzold (Bohemian), Jan Vesely (Hungarian), Ahmed Yildirim (Slovakian), Manuel Valiño (Spanish), David Bogdanowski (Polish), Joseph Grosselin (French), Auguste Friedel (French), Konrad Egger (German) and Berek Goldstein (Polish).

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    The bunk is made from a plank of old, unplaned pinewood. The sparse mattress smells of damp and rot, the same sweet smell that permeates the whole camp, the smell of decomposing bodies. Covered in a blanket made from remnants of filthy, striped jackets, Hurbinek lies there quiet, defenceless, almost still, looking nervously toward the ceiling and sometimes all about him, his mouth open and round and like a fish’s. He never stops shaking, he never has, he’s been shaking his entire little life. By his side Henek strokes his forehead, talks to him and smiles. He has stayed with him ever since he furtively retrieved him from the central roadway, and with a nimbleness Henek still retains though nobody knows how he manages it. He warmed him with his own body heat and held him to